though i don't particularly agree with some of the details, i found tonsky's clojure north talk + alabaster themes to be worth examining. here is an approximation of a dark version of the theme using emacs-tree-sitter: https://gist.github.com/sogaiu/a309e5391cf0c5cc723b659ba2fd0e55 (actually one might need to be using monokai for that to work)

so far the highlights.scm file and query syntax seem to be fairly straight-forward to apply to get so-so results. may be there will be more customized highlighting setups. i can imagine having a few set up to cycle through for different purposes -- e.g. if i'm working on a macro, may be i'd like a different kind of highlighting or if i'd like to read comments, get those to be less dim (though usually have them dim)